Flash Player 10.2 launched for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Adobe today announced their most revolutionized version of the very popular Flash Player 10.2. I had covered a post about it while this player was in Beta stage. You may want to read it here.

What does Flash Player 10.2 have?

Stage Video lets websites take advantage of full hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline. This builds on the H.264 hardware accelerated decoding in Flash Player 10.1. Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player can play even higher quality video while using dramatically less processing power, giving users a better experience, greater performance, and longer battery life. In our testing across supported systems, we’ve found it’s up to 34 times more efficient.

Put another way, Flash Player using Stage Video can effortlessly play beautiful 1080p HD video with just 1-15% CPU usage on a common Mac or Windows computer* – working across platforms and browsers, it will enable the best video experience for the most people. Many millions of more PCs, from netbooks to desktops, can now become slick HD home theaters on the web.

What is Stage Video?

Detailed information about Stage video is available on Adobe website here.

How to update?

This new version of Flash Player 10.2 plug-in can be downloaded from Adobe’s download site for most of the browsers.

If you’re using Google Chrome, which has Flash Player built-in also have released update of their browser 9.0.597.84. This update will get downloaded automatically & get installed upon browser restart. I have attached a screenshot below of Chrome on my computer.

Hope developers and users enjoy this exciting release. This makes me excited to see whether Steve Jobs brings Flash to iOS or not in their next OS updates.